“These men are accomplices in those deaths.
“Oh, they may not have killed anyone with their own hands. But they bought their lives from the killers. They failed to resist the killers. They co-operated with the killers in a scheme which, to be honest, none of us yet understands. For some reason these killers do not desire to wipe out the entire human race. For some reason they took women—grown women and girls not yet even into their teens—to breed a strain of men for purposes of their own. And these four men, taken captive in the jail where they were already imprisoned for crimes ranging from embezzlement to murder, were the stud bulls in that breeding project.”
Alderson pauses for a long moment. The strain is plain on his face; the honest disgust; the lack of comprehension that niggles at them all when they have tried to explain the uprising. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the testimony of the women who were these men’s victims. They committed forcible rape upon those women, and they did it willingly. They did it knowingly, and they did it repeatedly and routinely.” Alderson’s fist comes down on the rail of the jury box with each word “They enjoyed it. Not once did any of them attempt to spare his victim out of common humanity. Not once. Not. Even. Once.
“They say they acted under compulsion, or rather the defense says they were forced by fear for themselves. But they did have a choice, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Some crimes are so horrible that common decency demands that a decent man lay down his life before he will allow himself to be entangled in them. These men had the choice to die where they stood rather than aid the enemy. They had the choice to die rather than cooperate in the purpose that led the androids to come perilously close to wiping us out as a people. They had the choice to die rather than violate those women in the most brutal fashion imaginable.
“Ladies and gentlemen, those four men did not make the honorable choice. When you retire to deliberate, I ask that you consider the evidence that has been presented to you and that you find them guilty of the crimes with which they are charged. And when you have done that, I ask that you make the choice they refused, and assess against them the penalty of death. Thank you.”
“Damn straight,’ someone behind Kirsten mutters, and another, “Preach it, brother.” She cannot see their faces without twisting about conspicuously in her seat, but those she can see mirror their grim satisfaction with the prosecution’s summation. Unless the jury is cut from an entirely different cloth than their neighbors, and there is no reason to believe that they are, they are doubtless equally susceptible to Alderson’s unexpected eloquence. From behind her glasses, she sees the same hard determination in the narrowing of Manny’s eyes, the dangerous tightening of Andrews’ mouth in something that is not quite a smile.
Boudreaux stands as Alderson returns to his own seat. Compared to the Major’s, his stance seems less confident, his shoulders rounded in a scholar’s slouch rather than the precise right angles of his opponents. His hands clasped behind his back, he seems almost to wander into the center of the open space bounded by the judges’ bench and the tables, finding himself half-surprised to be facing the jury. He pauses for a moment, looking down at the floor, or his shoes. Then he says, almost softly, “You know, I was very impressed by Major Alderson’s summation just now. He makes a persuasive case for finding the four defendants guilty. Putting them to death, even. A sound case.”
McCallum lets out a yell and comes halfway to his feet before the Bailiff stationed behind him shoves him back down into his chair. Harcourt says quellingly, “Mr. McCallum, you will sit down and be silent, or I will have you removed from this courtroom. I will have order, Sir!”
When silence falls again, Boudreaux smiles faintly. “Even Mr. McCallum makes a good argument against himself.” He pauses again, gazing over the heads of the jury, then lowering his eyes to meet theirs. “But we can say so, ladies and gentlemen, because none of is in his position. Please God, none of us every will be.
“Because none of us can say what we would do when faced with our own deaths until we have been in that situation. Oh, we all want to think that we have the integrity and the strength to resist temptation. We want to think that we’d have the courage to say no. But then, we don’t have to answer that question in just that way, do we?
“But it gets worse even than that for one of the men who stand accused before you. For Harold Buxton, the question was not what he would do to save his own life. The question was what he could do to save his wife and his daughter from rape and possible death.
“And the answer to that question, tragically, was to harm others.”
A small stir erupts in a back corner of the courtroom, and Kirsten turns to see Millie Buxton making her way toward the doors, her face white and frozen with grief. Her husband’s eyes follow her for perhaps half a second, then drop blankly to his hands. A murmuring ripples through the room, instantly squelched by the rap of Harcourt’s gavel. “This is a public proceeding, ladies and gentlemen, but it is not an occasion for public comment. Do not oblige me to clear the court.”
Silence falls, and Boudreaux resumes. “What would you do, to protect your spouse? What would you do, to protect your only child from horror? Faced with a choice between harming someone you loved and someone you did not know at all, which would you mark out for suffering? When you consider the fate of Harald Buxton, ladies and gentlemen, ask yourselves these questions, and let your answers temper your verdict.
“In all four cases, ask yourselves whether we have not had enough of dying. Ask whether, in our present condition, with perhaps as much as seventy-five or eighty percent of our population dead or captive, we can afford to discard one more human life, even the life of a man who has committed abominable acts but who even so has not fallen so far as to murder. A life for a life, ladies and gentlemen, whether that life is taken or spared. Thank you.”
Only the rustle of papers breaks the silence as Boudreaux makes his way back to his seat. At the bench, Harcourt sifts through half a dozen sheets of printout and a pair of legal volumes marked with so many small post-its in so many colors that it looks like the business end of an old-fashioned feather duster. When he has found the passages he wants, he lays the books open before him. “Does the prosecution wish to offer rebuttal, Major Alderson?”
Alderson half rises in his chair. “No, Your Honor.”
“Very well. I will now charge the jury.” Harcourt pushes his glasses up onto the high bridge of his nose and begins to read from one of the heavy embossed volumes. As he details the legal definition of rape, assault, battery and the other lesser included charges, Kirsten allows her attention to wander. She had hated the ceremonial and bureaucratic aspects of her position as a Cabinet officer, the endless meetings, the wrangling, the trading off, the paper-pushing. Her role here is largely ceremonial, too, and she would by far rather be at home working on the android code. Or, better yet, sitting with Dakota before the fire, Asi sprawled at their feet.
But the atmosphere in this courtroom is free of both the cyicism and the zealotry to be found in government. The people who fill the spectators’ seats—the women brutalized by the four defendants; surviving residents of Rapid City, most of them women, too; the ranchers with faces and hands burned raw by the wind rolling unimpeded over the plains off the Arctic ice cap—sit in quiet solemnity, patient with the workings of justice. This community has begun to feel its way toward a framework of order. Perhaps other remnants, elsewhere, are even now faced with finding solutions to the same problem these face; perhaps their solutions are completely different. How would the Shiloh community handle a trial on a capital charge? And how, if she is successful in shutting down the droids, will she manage to draw together a collection of far-flung and disparate townships, villages, communes, no two with the same experiences since the world has changed?